- What does Ritchin mean by the “fluidity of the digital”? （Give an example of digital imaging/digital photography that exemplifies this.）
This “fluidity of The digital” means that the media’s content and context in the digital aspect can change even faster than the physical world. The “fluidity of the digital” can also refer to the change in images. When you store pixels, it can be edited at a faster pace. When you combine both of these elements, many images will go around the internet, but it will be changing ever so slightly. When this occurs, these images have more and more changes made. For example, more filters can be applied on the specific image, or the certain things can be cropped out. One example would be memes because the image can be edited, and depending on the edit, some people can interpret the joke in a certain way that could be different from the original meme that was created.
- Reflect on the extent to which photography is capable of capturing reality; and compare it to other media (technology) (e.g. text, video, virtual reality, books).
In my opinion,photography captures reality better than any other medium. For example, books and texts are only vividly expressed through the technology of language, but they only leave the audience with a large imagination space for their understanding since there is no visual representation. On the other hand, videos can be edited to deliberately cut out some scenes to direct the audience to maybe feel or view stuff in a certain way. In addition, photography is visually impactful and very direct in my opinion because the photographer has so much control such as the framing of the photo and where to focus. Photography captures the mood differently compared to books because books paint a picture in the reader’s mind while photos are actually present for the viewer to feel a certain emotion.